The Trachoma Map: Making eye disease visible

SciDevNet and Sightsavers enlisted a public health data visualization to shed light on the world's leading infectious cause of blindness.

Between 2012 and 2015, eye nurses collected data from selected villages around the world in the hopes of unearthing crucial information on trachoma - an infectious eye disease that has been blamed for the blindness of around 2.2 million people.

Using smartphones, inhabitants from 30 randomly selected households in each village were surveyed. The process involved over 550 trained teams, comprising of more than 1,200 people; including data collectors, nurses, ophthalmologists and epidemiologists.

Yet, the significance of this project reaches beyond its large scale and geographical scope - it also represents the first ever collection of standardized trachoma data.

Since each data collector used a consistent diagnostic criteria, and recorded this systemically using their smartphones, reliable data about the disease and demographic details about those affected could be reliably analyzed.

As a result of this project, intervention can be targeted towards vulnerable communities.

"We now know exactly how trachoma impacts people’s lives and we can use the data to plan our intervention," explained Caleb Mpyet, a Nigeria-based ophthalmologist and epidemiologist.

Comments

Your work featured on our website?

Do you want to see your work featured on our website? Are you interested to write as a guest for our Featured Projects section? Do you have a relevant project that you think should be featured?
Send us an email at [email protected]

Join the mailinglist

Join the EJC/OKF open data and data driven journalism mailing list, which aims to enable discussions and encourage collaboration between the community of open data experts and the community of journalists interested in working with publicly available data-sets.